Originally aired on April 07, 1995 - In part 32 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson recounts the April Battle of Shiloh, the commencement of war in earnest in the West.
#32 – The Battle of Shiloh
Across the Allegheny Mountains, in southwestern Tennessee, the words “April” and “Shiloh” have a fateful air. Just as First Manassas was the major opening battle of the Civil War in the East, Shiloh was the commencement in earnest of the war in the West. Yet in every respect, Shiloh was a far more sweeping conflict than the fighting along Bull Run in Virginia.
In the spring of 1862, Federal General U. S. Grant had seized Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, and Tennessee’s capital Nashville. Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, woefully outnumbered, had fallen back to Corinth, Mississippi. The Union army gave pursuit along the Tennessee River and went into camp a dozen miles from Corinth at a place the locals called Shiloh, after a nearby Methodist meeting house.
Sidney Johnston determined to launch a surprise attack on the Federals. It was a desperate attempt by the Southerners to clear Tennessee of enemy forces. Incredibly, Johnston was able to get his force up from Corinth and into battle position without the Union army aware of any immediate danger.
Each side had about 45,000 men in line. They were not armies; they were two armed mobs of young boys, each dreaming that battle would be sublime and that he would survive if others did not. Some of those new soldiers had never even loaded and fired the heavy muskets they carried.
At dawn on Sunday, April 6, 1862, Johnston attacked. The element of surprise was so complete that the Union position quickly bent into an L-shaped position. All day the storm of combat echoed over the countryside: no one battle but a hodgepodge of separate actions in which divisions and even regiments fought on their own as great waves of sound collided, dirty-white smoke enveloped everything, advance and retreat taking place sometimes because somebody had ordered it and sometimes because human instinct demanded it. Some of the deadliest fighting in American history was taking place, and the terrible clamor of battle kept mounting to a higher pitch as men fell and woods burned.
The heaviest struggle occurred on the Union left flank. Federals were anchored along a sunken lane. Confederates charged the position. To get there, they had to surge through a peach orchard whose pink blossoms seemed strangely out of place amid the killing. Southerners attacked the Federal line so many times that both sides lost count. Sidney Johnston bled to death from a bullet wound in the leg; shock-waves of gunfire were so intense that Confederates who fell in the peach orchard were covered in shrouds of peach blossoms.
Darkness ended the first day’s fighting. Both armies had disintegrated into small groups of combatants, with nothing but flags to give them unity – plus the inspiring determination in the hearts of those Northern and Southern boys who had never fought before, but who continued to show an uncommon capacity for battle and sacrifice.
A Union counterattack the next morning slowly turned the tide. By early afternoon the Confederates had abandoned the field and begun the painful march back to Corinth. The hopes of Shiloh had been incinerated in the fire of battle. The casualties foretold a bloody future. Total losses in all three of the nation’s earlier contests (the Revolution, War of 1812, and Mexican War) were 23,200 men. Shiloh’s losses were 23,700 soldiers. In one place burial parties dug a long trench to hold 700 dead Confederates.
The two armies marched away from Shiloh to other killing fields. Later, monuments would mark the spots sanctified by gallantry. One of those memorials is a simple plaque on which are the words:
Our bugle sang truce, and the night clouds had lowered,
And the sentinel stars set their watch in the sky;
And thousands had sank to the ground overpowered,
The weary to sleep, and the wounded to die.
